Saturday 27 July 2013 19.05 EDT
First published on Saturday 27 July 2013 19.05 EDT

On 4 October 1994 in an Irish bar on Glasgow's South Side, the consensus was that the Labour party had just breathed its last. That same day, Tony Blair had told delegates at the party conference in Blackpool that, within one year, he intended to do away with Clause IV. Thus Labour's commitment to "common ownership of the means of production", the totem around which party policy had always been formed since 1918, was at an end.

Blair's immediate justification for jettisoning the clause was that Labour needed to become "a modern party living in an age of change". It was a typically vacuous and indolent slogan that committed New Labour to quite a lot generally, but nothing much in particular. Effectively, Blair was saying that, in future, Labour would simply go with the flow and support any policy that might help get it elected.

The former prime minister must be proud that new life has been breathed into this legacy by Ed Miliband who, having somehow hoodwinked the trade union movement into backing his candidacy for the leadership, has now turned on them.

Miliband had his own Clause IV moment a few weeks ago when he sought to criminalise the Unite trade union over allegations of trying to manipulate the process by which Labour will choose a candidate to fight the Falkirk byelection. Some might say even that Miliband's decision to ask the police to investigate Unite was apposite as the only other political leader in recent times who has sought to criminalise trade unionists was Margaret Thatcher.

If, following its ditching of Clause IV, anyone still seriously believed that Labour remained the party of the people then Miliband's turn as trade union whistleblower must surely cause them to revise that opinion.

There remain many of us who believe that "common ownership of the means of production" is a reasonable position to hold in a modern democracy and can act as a counterweight to the principles of unregulated profiteering and criminal greed that underpin the UK banking industry. We would also say that Clause IV is an eternal rebuke to the global corporations that have been allowed to deprive the UK's exchequer of billions of pounds in tax revenue for the last generation or so.

In this light, the clause was not the apocalyptic pale rider of Marxist theory that haunted Blair's dreams but, rather, a benign espousal of ancient Christian principles of natural justice and human compassion. The modern Labour party, though, has made its choice of sleeping mate and, consequently, has been biting its pillow every night since.

Thus it is more exercised by benefit fraud and is acquiescent in the Tories' implacable mission to make the poorest and weakest in society suffer most in its austerity drive. Consequently, it has little to say when someone such as Geoffrey Howe, chairman of the Nationwide Building Society, attacks ordinary people with ordinary incomes for failing to understand why cutting bankers' bonuses would be a jolly bad thing.

"This isn't a Nationwide problem," Howe said last week. "It is a society problem. People just find it hard to understand why there is such a big differential between what the man in the street earns and what senior business people earn."

What he really means is that austerity is OK for normal punters (let's face it, they're used to it) but it would be bad for the financial sector. What odds am I offered against Howe receiving a knighthood for services to banking in the Queen's next birthday honours list?

These are things that the Scottish branch of the UK Labour party ought to have been pondering during its extended leave of absence while London brought its authority to bear on the Falkirk debacle. The Scottish Labour chief, Johann Lamont, we were told, has been handed more authority in Scotland than any previous party leader.

Her leadership, though, has thus far been an exercise in following blindly London Labour's lurch to the right. Indeed, the Westminster party even sent up Paul Sinclair, previously an adviser at Downing Street, to be her nightwatchman in the event that she strayed off message and turned native. Perhaps she should heed the words of her previous adviser, Simon Pia, who wrote an articulate article in the Scotsman earlier this month entreating the party to use American-style primaries as a means of reforming its constituency candidate selection process.

For – and let's be frank here – the selection of medieval cardinals was subject to less manipulation than the process by which New Labour has always ensured that only pale and wordless Islington automatons get to represent the people's party these days. An opportunity may soon present itself in Dunfermline depending on the outcome of the current trial of the sitting MSP, Bill Walker.

In the absence of Clause IV and of a credible Labour response to the widening gap between rich and poor in this country, it is the Christian churches that have suddenly started remembering who founded them and why. Writing in last week's Observer, John Sentamu, Anglican archbishop of York, dared to go where New Labour fears to tread when he addressed the scandal of low pay in Britain. "The holes in millions of pay cheques are being plugged by in-work support to the tune of £4bn a year," he said. "But why aren't those who are profiting from their workers paying up?"

The Church of Scotland has also announced that it will back Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, in his quest to destroy the payday loan companies and their obscene and predatory money-changing, designed to keep poor people and their children in chains for generations.

Who knows, perhaps the Catholic church will cease obsessing over gay people and make it a Christian, three-pronged attack on the real evils of our age.

Perhaps, too, they may even shame New Labour into accepting that "common ownership of the means of production" is not a bad thing for a person to believe in.